August 5, 2013

THE ACCIDENTAL NATURALIST:

My Wild Years

by
Ben Fogle

400
pages, Corgi

Review
by Pat Black

“Ben
Fogle – bloody nice bloke” is probably on a number of TV producers’ speed
dialling lists. He fronts a lot of TV shows with a nature slant, mostly owing
to the rapport he struck up with Inca the puppy on the early reality TV show Castaway in 2000.

He
has a kind of puppyish look to him, like a retriever in a bog roll advert – big
eyes, blond, polite, inoffensive. The Accidental Naturalist details a life spent among animals, from his days
growing up as a vet’s son in London to filming documentaries with the BBC’s
natural history unit around the world.

His
affection for the creatures he describes seems genuine – from the cantankerous
parrot Humphrey/Humphretta his father adopted to the dogs he grew up with in the
family home. There are many parts of this book that non-pet owners won’t get,
one such section being the simple pleasure of coming home from school as a
child and being greeted by a beloved four-legged companion.

Inca
the dog more than gets her dues. Not only did she help propel Fogle to stardom,
becoming a well-known celebrity in her own right during Castaway, but she helped him meet his wife during flirting sessions
with a fellow dog owner in the park. Shouldn’t this practise have a title of
some kind - like when smokers chatting up fellow nicotine exiles outside pubs
coined the phrase “smirting” in the wake of the smoking ban? I guess “dogging”
is out, anyway.

Fogle
then recounts his TV days, and rather gamely reprints an excoriating review of Death By Pets, one of his cringeworthy
bob-a-job early shows, by Ian Hyland in the Daily
Mirror. The upper half of his TV CV includes hosting coverage of Crufts and
a long-running series based at Longleat safari park, under the aegis of the
Marquis of Bath, one of Britain’s great eccentrics and shaggers. It was here
that Fogle first worked with the woman he jokingly describes as his “TV wife”,
his frequent co-presenter, Kate Humble.

Both
blond, polite and ever-so-British, Fogle and Humble make a good-looking pair on
TV. Have they done it? Aw, let’s play
nice, Fogle says they’re just pals. They are both happily married to other
people and have children. The Fogles called their first son Ludovic, after Kate
Humble’s husband, so they are most likely simply good friends and close working
colleagues - difficult though this perfectly civilised and entirely normal
concept is for my grubby mind to grasp.

A
theme that runs throughout the book is the conflict between humanity and
nature. It’s a familiar one if you love nature and yet also love steak. The
natural world doesn’t care about what it eats or what resource it exploits, and
sadly that goes for the majority of humans, too. But some of us do care about
the world’s creatures, whether big or small, ugly or beautiful, and ensuring
they survive. This leads to that nasty cognitive dissonance we might feel in
visiting the farm, petting a pig and then enjoying a bacon roll the next
morning. Fogle is shown this in harsh terms when he is made to break a
chicken’s neck as part of his training for Castaway;
one minute, it’s a bundle of life, all feathers and beady eyes, clawed feet
scuttling across the kitchen floor. The next, you’re pulling its guts out prior
to roasting it for dinner. The circle of life, my friends. We’re all on the
food chain.

Credit
to Fogle for looking at the humans/nature paradox through the eyes of people
from the developing world, who work hard to survive day-to-day while we in the
west offer contempt for their lifestyles - or even worse, gawp at their
surroundings as tourists. One senseless story details an endangered African rhino
having its horn removed by conservationists to stop poachers killing the animal
for it - and yet the poor beast was shot and killed anyway, for the sake of two
ragged inches or so of horn still remaining on the end of its nose, which would
fetch a fortune for the poachers. Disgusting tragedy – but follow the money.

The
division between well-meaning, kinder concerns and the rude reality of having
mouths to feed is further illustrated by one chilling night when Fogle and a
partner on a turtle conservation project in Central America are chased through
the jungle in between flashes of lightning by a local with a machete – most
likely in retaliation for their having collected hundreds of the turtle eggs
his family survives on.

There
are cute encounters with elephants, penguins, seals and domesticated cheetahs
and even blue whales, but the book also has terrifying face-to-face adventures
with giant crocodiles and sharks. Although Fogle naturally plays up the thrill
factor involved in “swimming with monsters”, he again shows us the
disconnection of turning deadly animals into a simple tourism exercise in
places where poor people often have to share their space with a creature that
could ingest them. One story about a mother and daughter who end up with only
one arm between them after a terrifying attack by a giant crocodile in the Nile
brings this home to you. As does the scrotum-shrinkingly scary tale about free
divers off the coast of California in the present day, risking their lives to
bring up shells and delicacies from the sea bed while great white sharks prowl
the kelp forests.

Short
of encounters with grizzlies in North America, in our safe, sanitised western
worlds, there’s simply very little risk of this sort of thing happening. Being
eaten by a living dinosaur is seemingly something that happens in books and
films - but for some people, the danger is a daily reality.

Credit
also to Fogle for standing up for the Chagossian islanders’ plight – he’s going
against the grain when it comes to conservation efforts here, as the Islands
have been turned into a marine reserve, an environmental paradise. It’s just
that the Chagossians have been evicted from their own homes and can’t go there
again because, well, Britain said so. Can’t there be balance, Fogle wonders? Can’t
the Chagossians become park wardens?

Even
in a house just like yours, though, there are more prosaic horrors lying in
wait. Accordingly, you should be warned: unless you’re a bloodless, cynical
git, you’ll need a hanky ready for the end of this book.

Losing
a beloved pet is a quite unique example of grief. You get all the pain and
shock of the death of a loved one who was present in your everyday life, but
no-one would equate it to the passing of a relative. Our pets’ lives are
finite, and all things being equal we know fine well one day we’ll wake up and
they won’t (unless you got a giant tortoise instead of a kitten off Santa that
magical Christmas). You couldn’t say to your boss: “I’m sorry, I had to put Bowser
down last night – I’m going to take a week off.” But I can easily recall the
soul-sucking, bone-crushing feeling of having to get out of bed and go into
work, just three hours after I had a beloved 18-year-old family pet put down.
That knowledge that something in life had irrevocably changed; that a light in
it had gone out. But I simply had to get on with things.

It’s
just a dog or a cat, to the rest of the world. But for you, the pain is awful –
qualitatively different to the death of a person; not for a moment would I suggest
it’s on a par. But still an awful, traumatic experience whether you’re young or
old.

Fogle’s
closing reminiscences in this book brought back some painful memories of the
final moments of pets of the past. But they also kindled nice ones, too – an
appreciation of beloved four-legged friends I’ve lost along the way. After the
shock has passed, it can be nice to remember. Perhaps, the way in which we
treat our animals is a defining characteristic of what it is to be human.